Considering Agile?

Your Destination

Adopting agile is never about adopting agile practices. It’s not even about adopting an agile culture. While those things are important, if you don’t achieve better business outcomes, adopting agile is not worth the investment. Your journey toward greater business agility starts by identifying what outcomes are most important to your company’s success. This knowledge helps you lay a foundation for making decisions about how to tailor your approach and guide your transformation to measurably show progress toward your critical business objectives.

predictability

Agile tends to focus on adaptability, but predictability is most often cited as the reason for an agile transformation.

quality

As organizations scale, product quality often suffers. Agile focuses on quality from requirements through implementation.

early ROI

Many organizations struggle with 18 month delivery cycles. Agile helps your team accelerate time to market and revenue.

lower costs

Cost savings are tough to promise, but agile can help make sure you are only spending money on the features most likely to generate revenue.

Innovation

As companies grow sometimes they slow down and lose the ability to innovate. Agile can help you get back your competitive edge.

Product Fit

Delivering on time is only important if you are delivering the right product. Agile can help you get the feedback you need.

Our Compass

We start by helping you take a look at what your company values from a planning perspective and comparing that against what your customer values from a delivery perspective. Organizations often find themselves operating in ways that don’t align with the goals of their customers. They might try to adopt agile to get things in sync, but end up out of alignment with how the rest of their company does business. Getting everyone working together is a process that can be planned and executed with clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes.

the journey

Far too often agile is sold as a predefined set of roles, artifacts, and ceremonies, and when those roles, artifacts, and ceremonies don’t work in your organization, it’s somehow your fault. The problem is that adopting agile is more about creating the conditions for agile to thrive rather than simply teaching people a new process or a new way of thinking. Adopting agile is about forming teams, building backlogs, and regularly producing working tested product increments. Transformation is about systematically removing barriers to making that happen.

the roadmap

Making the journey involves defining a team based organizational structure, a governance model to coordinate value, and a metrics strategy to guide and shape your transformation activities. We help you craft a pilot approach to exercise the structure, validate the framework, and challenge any assumptions made during planning. Metrics guide and inform our progress and help to shape the remainder of the transformation. Finally, we prepare your team with the knowledge and skills necessary to sustain the changes after our consultants have moved on.

Our Services

LeadingAgile facilitates the process by providing a unique blend of service offerings designed to help you define, implement, and sustain your agile transformation. Consulting and Media provide the foundation to implement the LeadingAgile change management approach. Training and Talent help you build the necessary infrastructure to find, hire, and develop your people as the organization grows. Studios and Labs work side by side with you to sustain the change, build products, and create innovative new solutions for your market.

latest field notes

Warning: Preachy content. In working with technical people at the individual and team levels, I often find attitudes that pull toward one extreme or the other: Either our work is inherently uninteresting, and we’re only in it for the paycheck; or our work is a boundless source of joy, learning, and achievement through which we can transcend the human condition. Both have it partly right. But I think both are missing a thing or two. tl;dr (Conclusion in a Nutshell) Don’t be put off when agilists seem to be demanding more of you than is reasonable. They like to use…

A tweet from Kevlin Henney in August 2018 reopened an old can of worms: The “issue” has never seemed a Big Deal® to me. Even so, a couple of things came to mind when I first read Kevlin’s tweet: Java is designed to work both ways: With wildcard imports or with specific ones. So, programmers who prefer one way or the other are using the language “as designed.” IDEs don’t necessarily default to specific imports. For example, the leading Java IDE on the market today, JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, defaults to wildcard imports (well, it makes reasonable choices based on what…

Large organizations are often hesitant to replace very old legacy applications that have served mission-critical business operations for many years. In fact, they are reluctant to modify the applications at all. Why is that? Before answering that question, let’s answer this one: Who Cares? Looking back over the course of the “agile” movement, it seems to me that larger companies began to take a serious interest in “going agile” once the idea reached the Early Adopter phase of the diffusion of innovations curve, and looked as if it was not going to fizzle out. Since then, many large organizations have…

For starters, let me just say there’s no problem with story points. Story points are a way of expressing the relative sizes of stories. They can be helpful for short-term planning of software development activities. Unfortunately, sometimes people get hung up on the numbers, and they lose track of the substance. People can get into the habit of repeating the buzzwords and marketing phrases that go along with a particular named or branded Thing. I’ve noticed a lot of software development teams bring certain buzzwords into their everyday vocabulary and use them creatively (or carelessly). It’s cool for a team…

﻿﻿ This talk covers techniques and approaches to developing and communicating roadmaps to your organization. Balancing Agility and predictability in a roadmap is a challenge, and stakeholders require transparency in order to effectively drive organizations forward. Product teams that efficiently deliver value to market require the flexibility to make decisions using the latest discovery and learning, while giving their team time to plan for the product’s direction. Whether your team is a startup looking to define your product strategy, or an enterprise looking to remain competitive while coordinating across hundreds of teams, this event will deliver valuable insights and techniques…

Ready to Go?

If you’re ready to get started, or even if you’d just like more information, the first step is to reach out and let us know you’d like to talk. Our team will setup a quick call to learn more about your organization, what you’d like to accomplish, as well as your budget and how soon you’d like to get started. Next we’ll put you on the phone with Mike, Dennis, or Jim to dive a little deeper into your goals and current challenges. If we both think there is an opportunity to help, next step is to get in a room to talk and explore our approach in more detail.

we are leadingagile

LeadingAgile is a company solely focused on, and extremely passionate about, leading
change in large organizations. Our goal is to help improve real business outcomes through the use of
lean/agile tools and techniques. We are building our company based on the same values and principles we
teach our clients and are doing our best to create the kind of culture that will attract and retain the most
talented people in the world. We are a work in progress. We are learning by doing. We are unafraid to push
the envelope and try new things.